Showing posts with label Celan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Celan. Show all posts

Monday, January 05, 2009

poetry happens between speakers

Pierre Joris is working on a super-translation of Paul Celan's Meridian Speech, and he's releasing pieces of it on his blog, Nomadics. The speech is full of important ideas. One of them is the "site of poetry" (Ort der Dichtung). And he began there to outline what he called the "In-Between" (das Inzwischen) that happens between speakers in talk. The "site of poetry" and "In-Between" are related concepts. Knowingly or not, many contemporary poets assume the centrality of these notions: a second space outside the poetic subject, made through intersubjectivity. A poem is as much Other Minds as it is the writerly self out of which the words are written.

Friday, November 09, 2007

Celan set to music

John Zorn approached Dan Kaufman to write something for his Tzadik label, the two quickly discovered their shared admiration for the work of Romanian Jewish poet Paul Celan. The result is Force of Light, Kaufman's eight-song homage to the remarkable, troubled poet.

Nextbook has covered this story and provides a link to the music. MORE...

Celan: "I have tried to write poetry in order to acquire a perspective of reality for myself."

You were my death:
you I could hold
when all fell away from me.


"One speaks in vain of justice as long as the largest battleship has not been smashed to pieces on a drowned man's brow."